Open Source in the Dominican Republic

While the government of the Dominican Republic leads Latin America in terms of its technological development, the private sector is still struggling to catch up. Luckily, the crowdfunding site Kickstarter has recently taken on a project by ThinkDrop that would help educate underprivileged children in the Dominican Republic. ThinkDrop is seeking $8,000 for the project, which would utilize the Drupal content management system to teach children about open-source programming. The $8,000 would be used for basic expenses, including keeping the electricity on while the team sets up a hub of operations.

This happy confluence of events will aid the Dominican Republic, which boasts a more stable economy than its neighbor Haiti, but which still relies heavily on tourism as an industry. The country has made tremendous gains in the last ten years in terms of technology. In 2000, there were 55,000 total internet users, about 0.7% of the total population. In 2010, that figure had blossomed to 3 million, or a little over 30% of the population. While these figures are still astonishingly low when compared with first world countries such as Finland or the U.S. or Canada, the rate of change is astonishing, and indicates a very positive upward trend.

Companies like ThinkDrop should be applauded for introducing open-source into developing nations such as the Dominican Republic. As other studies have shown, such as those which provided computers to children in India without the benefit of an instructor, sometimes access in of itself can make a crucial difference in how quickly a child learns. By opening up the doors of open-source technology to this community, there is literally no way of predicting how many innovative solutions may be created by virtue of providing those in the Dominican Republic with the tools of collaboration.

The long term goal of the project is to develop a bilingual curriculum that will dramatically impact the teaching structure throughout Latin America. If the project is successful—and there is ample reason to believe it will be successful, based on the success rates of other similarly-minded projects—the Dominican Republic and Latin America at large could become intellectually competitive with first world nations.